Two out of the last three tweets our president has blasted out have attacked Republicans. The first is hard to explain, but it told his followers to turn on Fox News at 9pm last night.
Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2017
At 9pm, Jeanine Pirro came on the air and demanded that Speaker Paul Ryan resign.
The second tweet is straightforward:
Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2017
What’s interesting is that Trump chose to attack both of the main antagonists on his bill. He attacked those on the far right who opposed it, but then he attacked the leader they were opposing. He also identified the Democrats as the enemy by suggesting that there was something wrong with them smiling.
That leaves the moderate Republicans as the only group he didn’t attack. But does he have preference between the moderate Republicans who supported Paul Ryan’s bill (for which he should resign) or the moderate Republicans who voted against the terrible Speaker who should just retire already?
I guess the challenge is for us to try to identify who in Congress the president considers his friend and ally. And the challenge for those friends and allies is to figure out if they will be attacked for doing what Trump asks them to do or for failing to do what he asks them to do.
Donald was particularly upset when he found out that Club for Growth is not a line of hair care products.
He had to drop his lawsuit suing them for his scalp malformation.
Is it possible to push the wedge between Trump and the Freedom Caucus such that he actively hates them to the point of sabotaging Heritage’s action plans? Half the people in his admin are there because of Heritage lol.
Predicting what Trump is going to do or say is like trying to harness a bee. He’s mercurial in his moods and says things right off the top of his ugly orange head. There’s no filter between his alleged brain and his mouth. I don’t know who he’s buddies with now or who’s on his poopy list. It changes daily, I suspect. I can’t imagine the sense of dread that his minions must face every day, creeping around on eggshells and trying to stay on his good side. But I hope it’s a perpetually lousy work environment and they disappear… Read more »
The only true friend and ally of Donald J. Trump is Donald J. Trump. No joke.
>>creeping around on eggshells and trying to stay on his good side
must be a lot like dealing with an absolute monarch (I’m thinking especially of some portrayals of Henry VIII)
As I pointed out yesterday (as part of my endless campaign to prevent anyone from overestimating Trump’s intelligence or knowledge), he’s stupider than even the worst absolute monarch because even the worst absolute monarch understands his power. Trump has no idea what is and isn’t his responsibility; what röle he plays in the government.
. . . with an absolute monarch . . . ?
Perhaps dealing with a wannabe-absolute-monarch clueless narcissistic fool?
I’m just guessing here. Happily, I lack the personal experience that would permit me to declare definitively that it’s so.
Zandar makes the point that the failure was entirely on the shoulders of the R’s.
I’m pretty sure that the calls, letters, town halls and soforth had a salutory effect. But I’m not sure that the result wouldn’t have been the same from a purely political perspective.
Apparently, the Negotiator-in-Chief made a tactical error when he threatned Mark Meadows (chairman of the Freedom Caucas) with “[I’ll] come after you…” (about midway down).
To quote Casey Stengal: “Doesn’t anyone here know how to play this game?”
He goes too much to one side. The Democrats in Congress didn’t have anything to do with it, per se, but activists and citizens most certainly did. There are reports that it failed by 25 votes (Trump likes to lie and say ranges between 5-15) — but I think it was greater than forty. You could make the argument that representatives like Comstock and Dent had an equal hand in killing it, and they flinched because of that CBO score on Medicaid. Further, for once, The Freedom Caucus was right! If you eliminate regulations but continue guaranteed issue and community… Read more »
You’ll never convince me this didn’t have a major and significant impact:
Heartening, but I think the legend has a negative sign error.
Nah, it polls positive in states like Wyoming and West Virginia. It polls negatively in areas that are blue — neutral in white. Its strongest state is Wyoming with a +12%. This is polling of their bill, not ACA.
Gotcha, thanks.
Honestly? I don’t think it did. While they pulled the plug because of 25-40 votes, those votes were from some of the blue states listed above: Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia …
These people have no heart, no empathy, no conscience and no political sense. They are in ultra safe districts because of luck or gerrymandering. THEY DON’T CARE.
I agree — but we are discussing the margins and who is responsible for failure, not the make up of the party who don’t care about policy outcomes. Unless you repealed community rating and guaranteed issue, you’d never get 20 or so votes from the Freedom Caucus no matter what. And they have a point: premiums would not have fallen, they’d have destroyed the individual insurance market instead. However, by accommodating the conservatives, you inherently lose the “moderates” (such as they are). As Matt Fuller has shown, there were 30 moderates, 30 conservatives, but 170 “party above all else”. About… Read more »
Was it an error? Or just a tactic that didn’t work but needed to be tried? The failure of Chumpcare hurt Ryan more than Trump. Trump is reportedly not that upset it failed. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obamacare-trump-supporters-idUSKBN16X005 So what does Trump care about? I think astamari316 has it right – Trump cares about Trump. Now Trump knows that the Freedom (sic) Caucus cannot be rolled by direct intimidation (at least not en masse). But they are small enough that they can be by-passed. This requires enlisting moderate GOP and Dems on moving on his campaign promises that were not normal GOP issues.… Read more »
Trump doesn’t care what succeeds or fails. He will lie no matter what. We are issue oriented. He IS NOT. The policy pros and cons are totally irrelevant to him. We are in an entirely new era.
That didn’t take long.
Mr President just needs to ask his mob associates to visit the GOP opponents of the health insurance “reform” bill. Either domestic or Russian mobsters will do.
Don’t think it didn’t cross his mind!
A political criminal, I’m telling ya…
I like to think I played a small rile by antagonizing Orange Shitstain on Twitter, telling him the GOP was disloyal and made him look weak and stupid.
you’re doing God’s work, brendan.
More here and also here. Oh, and this one is good too.
Maybe he’ll hire me. I’d be a much better adviser than Bannon.
From the Jeanine Pirro segment Trump recommended everyone watch: “I want to be clear, this is not on President Trump. No one expected a business man to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process. How would he know which individuals upon which he would be able to rely? Many of them friends and establishment colleagues of Speaker Ryan.” That is an absolutely damning indictment of Trump’s feckless ignorance and lack of fitness to the office of the presidency. He didn’t understand the policy goals or consequences of the bill. He didn’t understand… Read more »
Jaw dropping indictment, and he directs his tweet-boobs to watch it?
From “I’m the only one who can fix this, the only one!” to “no one expected a business man” to solve the problem. Yessir. His rubes will gobble down anything, I guess. “We are now at war with Oceania!”
And his “strategy” (after publicly praising everyone involved on Friday) is to denounce Team Conservative via tweet on Saturday? Simply incoherent.
He wanted to be Der Fuhrer and became Der Clown.
Jesus, maybe they will give him the 25th Amendment treatment…..
“No one expected a business man to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process.”
Right. It was only the entire fucking premise of his candidacy, that he would do exactly that, in so many words.
I wish I could rate your comment higher than 4.
And wow, how dumb do you have to be not to know that “Don’t blame Trump – it’s not his fault that he doesn’t know how to do his fucking job” is not praise?
Feels like we are headed to a government shut down. The donald has burnt the bridge to the votes he will need for all those tax cuts and deficit spending. Is that not Bannon’s dream come true?
Right.
If you really think that THIS congress will not vote to cut taxes on the 1% and get rid of the Alternative Minimum tax … I got land in SE Louisiana I’d like to talk to you about.
They might vote for that, but in terms of things like the budget and the debt limit I could see the House becoming totally dysfunctional at this point, with Ryan afraid to cross the Freedumb Caucus to make the necessary deals with the Democrats. Or Ryan getting ousted but the House unable to elect a Speaker and thus unable to function. Still unlikely, but plausible.
A whole lot of the agenda is reduction in taxes. The other part is expansion of business opportunities. Sounds good but it they need to pay for it all. So something has to go like health care and other budget items.
The GOP needs to issue a continuing resolution in April. So do they cut taxes before or after the government shut down?
I’d be utterly surprised if the Republicans worked to shut down the government while they control all three branches. It would be such an utterly stupid “own-goal” on their part.
The purpose of the government shut-downs is to strip funding from programs and agencies they don’t like. They don’t need to do that with Trump in the White House. You’d have to accept that they actually believe all the budget-deficit nonsense they spout when a Democrat is in control. They’ve shown us repeatedly that they don’t.
Good point, but we are talking about the “Freedom” Caucus here.
This is Reichsfuhrer Bannon lashing out as well.
Who’s the worse strategist?
Definitely devote more time, attention and pixels on a terrible legislative defeat, yeah, that’s the ticket!
>> a terrible legislative defeat
I liked this take from dkos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/03/25/1647070/-Today-was-NOT-a-defeat-for-Trump
on why this was worse than a defeat, it was a failure.
You all already know what I’m going to say, right? As Katy Waldman documented so well in Slate (link below), Trump’s response to the AHCA fiasco is totally incoherent, because he’s got to square not one but two circles: he’s got to take credit for things going totally his way (“The beauty part” is that the Democrats “own” Obamacare, so when it “explodes” it’ll be their fault) (since “good news” for Trump’s political profile is apparently the same thing as “good news” for all Americans)…while, simultaneously, “the Democrats” and the Freedom Caucus scuttled the bill, which is presented as bad… Read more »
I thought you were going to say opening the trunk, which would have been better.
Great car imagery, and to add to it: The car stalled although he had warning because the “check oil” light was on but he ignored it,
This fiasco was SO preventable. Just how fast can Trump drive his car into a tree?
Preventable for any reasonably intelligent politician who knew what he was doing.
Trump, now….
The repeal of health care may have been the first shot at reducing taxes and spending. High income individuals pay a net investment income tax of 3.6%. And it would have saved some money on fewer insured. It is just one part of his agenda. And there is no guarantee it won’t come back again. I think it likely will. We should remember Trump wants to reduce taxes, nearly all on the elite, eliminate all estate taxes and impose an import tax that is regressive, such that the lower income people will suffer the most. He will also let corps… Read more »
He doesn’t want friends and allies. He wants slaves and toadies. He’s a CEO, remember?
Maureen Down opened the door and shouted the obvious at Trump in today’s column. You’ve been duped, you’re a fool and a tool. If Trump reads that column it may even spark a brain cell or two to hurt his feelings into understanding how everyone is in on the game to use him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/donald-this-i-will-tell-you.html?_r=0
wow. She really sliced him up good. That was delicious.
I think the significance of this is lost in the absurdity of the last week.
Donald Trump is quite clearly coordinating attacks on his rivals with Fox News. They are his agents, they aren’t merely fellow travelers.